Slashdot Mirror
NetBSD Now Supports Dual Power PC Processors
djcdplaya writes: "DaemonNews is reporting that the good guys over at NetBSD have gotten dual PowerPC processors working on dual-G4 Apples. The NetBSD mailing can be found here."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
It may be 1:20 in your little world, but when you posted this it was 10:20AM. Just like BSD might be dead in your little world.
I wish Linux would die.
Netcraft confirms:
49 of the 50 longest uptime web servers are running *BSD.
And, of course, everyone *NEEDS* totally killer CPU horsepower for *ANY* application they are using...
Oh, wait... my firewall at home is a Pentium/166, not even MMX. Well, it seems to do a fine job at what it needs to do. My desktop machine at home is a piddly little PIII/550.. hey, it runs QuakeII and Half-Life pretty decently, and other than that I hardly think my web browsing and checking my email hardly rates tossing a large chunk of money at a 2.4GHz P4 with a $400+ 3d video card.
I'm not using Matlab or Mathcad or Maple or whatever to crunch large simulations for hours, nor do I particulary care whether I get 120fps
vs. the 30fps my eye can detect.
I see like 12 or so totally offtopic comments saying BSD is dead. Here is what I have to say about it.
:)
In the last month, as a hobbyist i've set up 3 BSD systems.
I like BSD, the install isn't bloated, the system boots up REALLY fast, and it really is a better place to start than Linux if you want to learn UNIX standards.
This message is coming to you through a transparent squid proxy
Now for some on topic stuff.
SMP on PPC? Cool beans!
--toq
30 FPS your eye can detect? Strange that a "Flicker Free" monitor is rated at 72 hz. If your eye can only see 30 fps, I'd expect that 30hz would be the line for a flicker free monitor.
Pardon my skeptism, but I think that as of right now a port of NetBSD in a dual ppc system is unnecessary.
Why would anyone in their right mind want a dual ppc NetBSD system when Apple already markets/supports and extends the leading OS for the platform: OSX?
Yahoo & Hotmail use FreeBSD. Yes, Hotmail still uses FreeBSD. I have seen porn sites on the list in the past, which is a good test for the robustness of a site.
BTW, NO company, large or small is representing Linux on the list.
Interesting that you didn't provide any benchmarks.
The "video editing" benchmark compares very different products on the two platforms-- one not supported at all by the maker, one highly optimized.
And SPEC is a set of benchmarks, you chose the one where the PowerPC looks worst... ignorign the fact that when it comes to FP operations, or the instruction mix of a modern app, the results would be much different.
The Photoshop comparisons are not unreasonable.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
The only OS on the "not tracked" list that has ANY usage as a web server is NT 4. Unless you think NT would otherwise make the list, that list IS irrelevant.
As for the 497 day rollover, a Linux box with a 1.5 year uptime? Don't make me laugh. If the last paragraph implies that Solaris should be represented more, then you have a point.
I don't quite see why this was modded as a troll. This AC has brought up a good point: Apple's marketting arm has been blabbing about increased performance with Motorola's G4s, when the truth is, the CPU doesn't shine in real-world applications, using compilers that are available on the market, and programs that *real* people use. Sure you don't need 2Ghz to browse pr0n, but still, if the company's claiming to be better, the least it could do is back it's claims with some hard facts.
I love Apple's UNIX push with MacOS X, but sometimes the truth hurts... x86s are simply cheaper and faster (Note: I didn't say "Better"; You make your own conclusions).
You don't kow much about human vision, do you?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
saying things as objective and eloquent as that, we should be just fine in a few years, and MS may finally start playing nice when they realize people don't want to be represented by just one company or flavor (and no, different versions of the same win32 OS just won't cut it :)
Nice to hear(?) you say it BitGeek
you need twice the clock rate [much like with sound bandwidth].
If you can sample pictures at 30hz then you need 60hz of bandwidth [e.g. 60fps] to prevent frequency aliasing. Much like how you can't hear >22khz but you need to sample at atleast 44khz to get the nice 20khz of bandwidth.
Tux-ho!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
on my old 8500/120 (single CPU) last week. Exposing the boot loader was tricky, but after that it went ok. An "huzzah" seems in order for this news.
You have to active BSD-section-slashbox, not all BSD news make it to the main page. Who says they lost funding? Who say they need funding?
In the face of real evidence, you are losing the argument. You didn't read the whole post - but the simple fact is, if you take C, compile it (funny how Apple is using GCC now - so the crying about the compiler argument goes out the door) and run it on various places, it will always be slower on the fastest PPC than and x86 at half its price.
I've heard Motorola PPC zealots (no one complains too much about the IBM PPC because they are forthcoming about its performance in "real life") claim lots of things, but the G5 isn't coming out. Motorola cancelled it. And I find it impossible to believe that all the innovation since the G4 taped out by the other CPU vendors is crap, worthless and leads to no real world performance gains.
I've used Linux on the PPC, and on a an x86 from the same era, invariably, the PPC will always be slower at anything, serving web pages, compiling the kernel, you name it, its slower.
Sorry pal, the benchmarks are fair. A dual Mac gets its house blown over by a single x86, and no amount of FUD can undo that.
Now, back to reality, if Apple used fat binaries like NeXT did, this would be a moot point. But the Apple zealots cant realize - the only way Apple plans to sell OS X is from the sale of a new machine, which is where they make all their money. Its on the balance sheets pal, Apple is a hardware company with an exorbitantly high markup. Only 20% of Crapple users use OS X right now, which is the only reason to use CrApple. (This must signify Apple users are dumb, or the older hardware is too shitty to even run BSD quickly or a combination of the two.)
Why doesn't Apple publish SPEC? Its an excellent metric for CPU performance. As far as Disk and Video go, well, Apple use IDE by default but you can still get SCSI, that would be normalized cross platform to about the same performance, and finally video, this is where the PC cleans house. The video cards available for PC are much higher end than Apple's offering. With x86 boxes, you get more performance for your dollar.
So here I am - replying to a zealot that sees a G4 Spec mark and says no go on the benchmark, he claims its not a benchmark. Then the fool says real world applications don't count either. Can't do much with a zealot, all proof and no play makes Mac users dull boys.
Note: The Dell 1650 and 2650 are both cheaper, the 2650 has SMT, and ECC (and nice linux ecc support as well, it logs ECC errors in syslog). They also include onboard RAID(option
via 7899 asic) and a U160 AIC-7899 by default. And you can buy retail CPUs and retail memory for Dells often at half the price without voiding the warranty.
Apple charges $500 per 120GB EIDE drive. HAHAHAHA.
Apple is right about one thing, that Alpha has existed for some time, but have you ever tried actually buying an Alpha? Its hard, I know an engineer who works for DEC->/Compaq->/HP, and I was dying to buy one, and he couldn't find anyone to call me about getting one.
Apple's New 1U servers: Sorry. Doesn't fit well in a market where the Dell 1550/1650 and 2550 and 2650 exist. Sorry. THEY DON'T PUBLISH SPEC numbers. Apple is a dying breed, I just recently tried to revive my interest in them only to be disappointed. The Motorola PPC architecture is embarrassingly slow, and they always are quick to point out the near-useless Altivec and some obscure filter in Photoshop, but its not true. I have a Mac, several PCs and a SPARC at *home*, so trust me people, this box is a bore. And OS X and Open ClosedROM make putting regular memory, disks and CPU upgrades NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE, they try to block it so you have to buy the same part from them 3x the cost. And the Dell 530 Dual P4-Xeon with SMT buries the fastest Mac by almost a factor of two. OS X is no great shakes as of yet because even though most of the porting off of Classic has been done, there are annoying remnants of classic everywhere, including a gamut of Apple utilities. These are notoriously the worst Administrator-unfriendly boxes in the industry, and I have used a few boxen in my time. OS X's Darwin kernel will be sorely eclipsed by Linux 2.6, and 2.4.X is already superior in all the ways I can tell (This isnt to say BSD it bad, but I dont think this OS demands a PREMIUM). I tried YellowDog, Madrake and Debian on PPC as well, and they ran (even with aggressive G3 optimizations) rather poorly - but interestingly far faster than native OS X. This is a dying gasp of air from a dead Unix vendor, who has had to turn themselves into a Microsoft VAR (most popular Mac Application: Microsoft Office X). If you have an insatiable fetish for PPC, DON'T. Wait for Hammer. Remind yourself about SMT, and 2.8GHz clock speeds before you go pay for obsolete/deprecated silicon. And the term RISC? Pathetic. I happily resell our product on a 1650 and 2650. We "configured" a Mac box because we were genuinely curious. We laughed at the final price and moved on. This isn't a troll, or a flame - its reality. What this box does can be done with a 1650, with redundant power supplies, with SCSI and hardware raid build ON BOARD, dual gigabit NICs onboard, dual 1400 MHZ/512cache Tualatin (with SPEC numbers to gauge the performance by) (2650 gets high clock Xeons), two 64bit/66Mhz slots, onboard video, console redirection, USB, etc. And for half the price. And you can use retail Intel CPUs,(cheap), retail hard drives (if you don't want to buy the Dell ones at a modest premium), and retail Crucial.com memory (the same memory Dell uses for Half the price). All in all, you get a box, for half the price, with twice the features and performance. And this is coming from a person who doesn't even LIKE Dell. (I feel I can always build better more reliable systems than most of the PC vendors.) BBBBBBZT. Apple, you lost, you lost, you will always be niche because OS X isn't where it needs to be - on an X86.
Could it be (sniff, sniff) Windows, the best and most popular operating system on the face of the earth?
No, that's not it. I wonder what it could be.
It's simple, really. The annual payroll for AMD's and Intel's R & D staff exceeds the entire revenue produced by the sales of all Motorola PPC desktop processors. The reason the PPC is failing is the same as why the Soviet Union failed -- Motorola is being vastly outspent in this "arms" race.
Get a life again.
I honestly can't believe you wrote all that shit that I don't care about.
Well as a linux fan I have to disagree.
I use OpenBSD for my firewall and I'm quite satisfied. Big telco company in Czech Republic uses FreeBSD for their mail and secondary servers and so on. *BSD is fine and (look for changelogs) not dying.
Cuba++ let's make ++ better
I thought the point of this was so that the NetBSD portion of OS X's Darwin would finally be capable of utilizing dual CPUs. Am I missing something?
If previously NetBSD in OS X, et al was only cinlge CPU aware then OS X Server has been sub-optimal from it's inception as a server and now should see very nice performance improvements to such things as the TCP/IP stack and many other networking technologies.
I'm definitely curious to see what impact this will have for OS X Server. I assume that it was Apple's engineers that privided the 'last mile' details to get this working... nicde work people.
Maybe we'll be seeing TiVos with Dual G4 PPCs running NetBSD in the future or something too..
BTW, does anyone know if PPC Linux distros are MP aware?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Apple doesn't ship BSD OSs, just some utils! It's MACH kernel, not BSD kernel! MACH kernel has nothing to do with *BSD.
Hell, I was karma capped for a while, I can live with the negative mods...
Take it tux
This is a joke, I've set up both Linux and FreeBSD, Linux has more apps, FreeBSD is cleaner. I've used Solaris, SCO, Tru64, AIX, HPUX, SunOS, even DG/UX on a Motorla 88K. Pick whatever works best for you and be happy with it.
[editor's note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It's when you get distracted by the politickers that they sideline you. The tireless work that you perform keeping the system clean and building is what provides the platform for the obsessives and the prima donnas to have their moments in the sun. In the end, we need you all; in order to go forwards we must first avoid going backwards.
To the paranoid conspiracy theorists - yes, I work for Apple too. No, my resignation wasn't on Steve's direct orders, or in any way related to work I'm doing, may do, may not do, or indeed what was in the tea I had at lunchtime today. It's about real problems that the project faces, real problems that the project has brought upon itself. You can't escape them by inventing excuses about outside influence, the problem stems from within.
To the politically obsessed - give it a break, if you can. No, the project isn't a lemonade stand anymore, but it's not a world-spanning corporate juggernaut either and some of the more grandiose visions going around are in need of a solid dose of reality. Keep it simple, stupid.
To the grandstanders, the prima donnas, and anyone that thinks that they can hold the project to ransom for their own agenda - give it a break, if you can. When the current core were elected, we took a conscious stand against vigorous sanctions, and some of you have exploited that. A new core is going to have to decide whether to repeat this mistake or get tough. I hope they learn from our errors.
Future
I started work on FreeBSD because it was fun. If I'm going to continue, it has to be fun again. There are things I still feel obligated to do, and with any luck I'll find the time to meet those obligations.
However I don't feel an obligation to get involved in the political mess the project is in right now. I tried, I burnt out. I don't feel that my efforts were worthwhile. So I won't be standing for election, I won't be shouting from the sidelines, and I probably won't vote in the next round of ballots.
You could say I'm packing up my toys. I'm not going home just yet, but I'm not going to play unless you can work out how to make the project somewhere fun to be again.
= Mike
--
Actually, to those of you that care, the 72hz refresh rate has nothing to do with 'normal human vision' in terms of frame rates. The main problem with a 60hz refresh rate is that, for those of us that work in a corporate environment, flourescent lights also flicker at the power-line frequency (although the eye generally can't notice, unless the ballast is going)... when the lights flicker at 60hz and the screen refresh is 60hz, you can notice the flicker of the screen. Thus, they increase the screen vertical refresh rate to 72 hz (or above) so as to eliminate the 60hz effect the eye can see.
Darwin is the underlying OS (sans GUI and iApps) of OS X. OS X and OS X Server are both SMP-aware/capable-Mach-mk-under-BSD based OSs (really the same OS, the server version has more chrome). NetBSD is not supplying the SMP for OS X and Darwin, it's there already. There are no major performance problems with the server portion of OS X (although there are some lingering GUI performance issues and, of course, some Mac architectural issues).
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
don't you know how much it hurts?